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Earth Day, 2009: The More You Know, the Less You Care

What on Earth is going on in Washington? The public believes
less and less that human beings are responsible for global warming,
surface temperature shows no net change in over a decade, and
there’s still a bill about to be debated in the House that will
require the average American in 2050 to have a “carbon footprint”
no larger than it was for the average American in 1867.

The politics of global warming are becoming increasingly
disconnected from the people. Day after day, hour after hour,
telescreens shout, “Go Green! Go Green!” Fewer and fewer people
care.

On April 19, Rasmussen Reports released a new global warming
poll: 48 percent of respondents believe that observed climate
changes are being “caused by planetary trends,” while 34 percent
believe they are a result of human influence on the atmosphere.
When Obama was sworn in, the relative numbers were 44 percent and
41 percent. Just three months ago, opinion was pretty much evenly
split, and now there’s a whopping 14 percent plurality in favor of
“natural causes.”

The politics of global
warming are becoming increasingly disconnected from the
people.

This is a change from bad to worse in the eyes of
environmentalists. In January, Gallup found that, out of 20
prominent issues, Americans ranked global warming dead
last in terms of importance. If the newer Rasmussen results
are any guide, support has waned even further since then.

If the political class would have done its homework, it would
have seen this coming. The incessant hype has generated a massive
political backlash. It was first documented over a year ago in the
refereed journal Risk Analysis, by Paul Kellstedt and two
colleagues, political scientists at Texas A&M University.

The standard thinking is called the “knowledge deficit” model.
That’s academese for the notion that the poor blokes aren’t
concerned about global warming because they’re just stupid and
haven’t heard enough about it. Obviously no one watches television
any more (CNBC’s peacock is green this week), walks outside in
major urban downtowns (plastered with billboards and posters
— from energy companies — urging their customers to use
less of their products), or goes to the movies (The Day After
Tomorrow, An Inconvenient Truth, Ice Age: The Meltdown,
etc).

Actually, people still do go to the movies, and watch TV, and
are assaulted every urban minute with global-warming propaganda.
And, according to Kellstedt, the more people know about global
warming, the less they care:

Contrary to the assumptions underlying the
knowledge-deficit model, as well as the marketing of movies like
Ice Age or An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on
both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are
exactly the opposite of what were expected.

Jon Gertner touched on this in last Sunday’s New York Times
Magazine. He noted that debate as to why climate change isn’t
higher up on the priority totem-pole usually is blamed on “the
doubt-sowing remarks of climate-change skeptics,” or “the poor
communication skills of good scientists.”

This prism has bent the light on global warming exactly wrong.
In fact, it is the communication skills of scientists that are
responsible for people’s opinions. Kellstedt found that people
“with high confidence in scientists … show less concern for
global warming,” as did the “more informed respondents.” Americans’
lack of alarm has less to do with “skeptics” than it does with
people’s perception of mainstream science.

Interestingly, this is parallel to other issues at the
science-political nexus. Despite years of campaigning against
genetically modified (GM) food on the part of many
environmentalists, the more people learn, the less concerned they
are about that, too.

Maybe this has to do with the fact that Americans have been
consuming, in one form or another, GM food for decades, and we
obviously aren’t dead yet. Sober scientists note that GM foods are
nutritionally indistinguishable from their progenitors — so
when someone else loudly and angrily foretells disaster upon
disaster that will befall us from the use of GM products, people
say “so what?” And when they see some movie about the horrors of
global warming — if they know that scientists observe that
the planet’s surface has been warming episodically and modestly for
a century — they likewise say, “So what? It’s a
movie.”

Washington would be well-advised to pay attention to what folks
are telling pollsters out beyond the Beltway.

But it’s Earth Day, so I expect the response of the political
class here will likewise be, “So what?”